TheCable

Kayode Fayemi, governor of Ekiti state, has urged Nigerian youths to go beyond “Twitter revolution” and take up political roles if they want to effect change.

Fayemi said the youths must participate in “retail politics” in their respective wards, just like he had decided to do.

He was speaking at the national security and peace symposium organised on Friday in Ibadan to mark the 45th birthday anniversary of Shina Peller, member of the house of representatives from Oyo state.

“If we want to make a difference, our young ones cannot just be doing Twitter revolution. They have to be on the ground, they have to be in their wards, in the constituencies,” the governor said.

“They have to play retail politics with the people in order to really connect themselves beyond just writing 140 letter word on Twitter or Facebook.

“I stupidly decided that I was going to go into politics rather than stick to my academia which would have been a safer place to be than politics. But I am sure all of us know that you can affect more lives and people in politics.

“That is what Shina has done. He removed himself from just being a paper-based politician by being in the midst of the people.”

Also speaking, Isaac Albert, dean of multi-disciplinary studies at the University of Ibadan, argued that insecurity has persisted because too many issues are being handled by the federal government.

“The problem here is we are not allowing traditional rulers to play their roles. And for as long as this continues, our problems will continue to increase. We have refused to allow local government to function,” Albert said.

“We see our president in Abuja trying to explain what belongs to local government. The problem he is struggling to solve in Abuja are problems that traditional rulers can even allocate to their chiefs to deal with. So, if you take local problems to Abuja, then you have Abuja saturated with unnecessary problems.

“To deal with these problems, we need a framework of community engagement. If you take this framework to the local level, many of the problems we have in Nigeria today will be resolved.”